November 15, 2008

So maybe spam is not inevitable

Unfortunately it won't last long, but if a single journalist and blogger could do this (Brian deserves much applause) maybe a concerted effort could bring cleaner mailboxes and render e-mail useful and reliable again.(First paragraph of a November 12 story by Good Morning Silicon Valley, read the full post here - thx MB for the link):

If your e-mail in-box suddenly seems to be missing its normal quota of
spam today, you can thank Brian Krebs, who writes the SecurityFix blog
for the Washington Post. In his own personal mission to comfort the
afflicted and afflict the comfortable, Krebs dug up enough dirt on San Jose’s spammer-friendly Web hosting company McColo
to persuade its two major Internet providers to cut it off. By the
reckoning of some Web security experts, McColo’s facilities were used
to spew out as much as 75 percent of the world’s junk e-mail daily and
its client list included a Who’s Who of notorious cybercrime gangs
involved in a wide range of spamming and scamming. Krebs spent four
months building a case before taking his findings to McColo’s
providers. Both were apparently spurred to action. Global Crossing
wasn’t discussing its response publicly, but Hurricane Electric’s Benny
Ng told Krebs, “We shut them down. We looked into it a bit, saw the
size and scope of the problem you were reporting and said ‘Holy cow!’
Within the hour we had terminated all of our connections to them.” By
this morning, McColo’s Web site and all its IP addresses were
unreachable.